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Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections

In later years Katsushika Hokusai liked to sign himself "The Old Man Mad for Drawing," an apt nickname for an artist who made more than thirty thousand drawings in his lifetime, many of them sketches for a series of fifteen "how-to" manuals for aspiring artists, first published in 1814. When the final volume appeared in 1878, twenty-nine years after his death, Hokusai's earlier designs had already been carried to artists such as Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas in Paris on the great wave of exports from Japan after its harbors were first opened to European and American traders in the 1850s. At the age of seventy, Hokusai began issuing sets of large landscape prints of cool, countryside vistas, far removed from the urbane pleasures of Kabuki theater or geisha houses, the customary subjects for Japanese popular color prints. No Japanese artist ever strayed so far from classical Chinese landscape models as Hokusai in this close-up view of tumbling waterfall and rugged rock face, shutting out both the sky and any far-off mountain peak. John Ittmann, from Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections (1995), p. 226.